Impénitence et fidélité chez Edmund Burke

Abstract

The indispensable corollary to shameful memories ought to be repentance. Tellingly so, no such notion appears in Edmund Burke’s writings about the French Revolution and Ireland. After all, the French revolutionaries with their tabula rasa were, as if necessarily so, immune to repentance: they, and their British supporters, were content to repeat those hallowed moments in the past where some supposed evil had been stifled, as with the execution of Charles I; as for Irish Protestants, they were not inclined to abandon what enabled them to crush their coreligionists of the older persuasion, even though this led them to overlook that English oppression bore on them and Catholics alike. Burke engaged in historiographical issues that, by redressing erroneous outlooks on past events, might have provided a sense of unity against a common enemy. His efforts were as damningly shaky as could be found, and he could not have been entirely convinced by his own rhetoric which tried to identify early forms of worship and/or political arrangements that could have supplied the solution. The foundation of such political analyses seems to derive from his juvenilia, specifically his Sublime and Beautiful, where the figure of Job casts doubt on the very relevance of repentance. Ultimately, shameful memories, with their nonexistent sequel, repentance, have precious little to tell of Burke’s engagement with the future where the latter emerges as the bottom line of one who is only too easily regarded as an exponent of the pleas of the past against the present day.

Keywords

• Repentance
•  French Revolution
• Ireland
• Richard Price
• providence
• Protestantism